Page 50 of Cross My Heart

I sucked in a breath. “Yeah, I was just thinking about the storm.”

Aiden looked up at the sky, and I admired the scruff on his jaw. “You can feel it in the air.”

We’d reached the end of the display, where a Santa popped out of a present. The movement was neat and captured my attention for a few seconds. The girls had already seen the display and were chasing each other around.

“Can you imagine yourself settling down one day, maybe even having kids of your own?”

“You already asked me that,” I said, my back stiff.

“Maybe it’s too soon, but I wanted to see if being here changed your perspective on life.” Aiden’s voice was soft.

He wasn’t pushing me; he was genuinely curious.

I shrugged. “I’m not sure.” I knew what I was supposed to do. Go back to my apartment and job in the city and work hard. Look for a job where my boss appreciated me, but what if I never found that? What if I felt lonelier than ever when I returned? What if I wasn’t fulfilled by my job anymore? Now that I’d seen how people lived here, living on Christmas tree farms, at the inn…

Aiden’s hand ghosted down my arm, and his fingers tangled with mine. “You feel it, don’t you?”

“How magical it is here?”

A smile spread over Aiden’s face.

“You two coming to the bonfire at the main house?” Heath asked us.

Aiden didn’t drop my hand, and my heart pitter-pattered when he said we could come for a bit.

Heath grinned. “I heard all the guests checked out. It’s just you two in that big inn. You want to stay with us?”

“Nah. We’re good where we are,” Aiden said.

Heath and Marley used to live at the inn too, but when Cole bought his own place, they moved back into their cabin here. Charlotte stayed in their guest room.

Heath gestured around the property. “Each one of us built a cabin.”

“I’m surprised you can all live here without fighting.”

“Oh, we do that too. But we like being close. We want our kids to grow up together, to be raised the way we were. We loved running these fields.” Heath watched Ember and Addy as they giggled and chased each other.

“See you there,” Aiden said as we walked toward his truck.

We had to go through the whole light display a second time to get to our vehicles.

This time, everyone talked among themselves, the couples holding hands, or with one arm flung over a shoulder. It was nice. I wished my family got together like this. It seemed like we were never in the same place at the same time.

It couldn’t necessarily be helped, but I didn’t have to be the one not making an effort to come home. I could still visit even when I went back to work. But I knew that was unrealistic. I traveled most weekends to hotels. Now I’d need to report to my ex who was hired after me and didn’t have the vision I had. It would be awkward at best.

My chest tightened.

“What are you thinking about?” Aiden asked when we were inside the cab of his truck.

“Work.”

Aiden patted my hand. “No thoughts about work tonight. We have a bonfire to get to, s’mores to eat, and a snowstorm to experience.”

“That sounds nice.” I relaxed into the cushions of the seat, watching Aiden as he put the truck in gear and drove behind the line of other trucks down the hill toward the main house.

“By the time you have to go back, you won’t want to leave.”

“Is that your plan?” I teased him.

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